The Ego's "How am I doing?"

Perhaps the human ego is the leftovers from when the trillion cells got together as muscle bone and nerves and needed to have feedback as to their effectiveness as a team, and so the ego was formed with the task of determine overall effectiveness internally and externally. And so the ego is endlessly answering the question "how am I doing?"

The ego does not stop when bumping into other people, however. Just keeps on doing its thing, and includes those other people as exterior factors to be dealt with, in the endless measure of how well the person's huge team of cells is doing in the world of outside including other people.

When the "I" identity in the "How am I doing?" increases from the bunch under just one person's skin but then also includes one's species and indeed the entire life chain that flows on this planet which flows through the person such as through food, then a more fitting responsibility for the larger ego happens, no longer just another suckling on Mother Earth but a fully responsible aware team member, in the enjoyment of the splendid churning of physical matter by the incoming energy of sunlight, and of the stirring of the oceans by the churning of the tides by the spins of the Earth and the Moon leftover from the planet-forming processes. With the ego's "I" having become the identity of all life, the living team could again be guided more efficiently by endlessly answering the question "how am I doing?"

J E D Cline 20080328, 0843 hrs

The harder it will be to climb out of the hole

It seems to me that with the incredible debt load our country has racked up in recent years, that we need to get everybody to work. We have a lot of people-power that is not being utilized adequately if at all, such as the retired and unemployed folks. To get them into the GNP loop, gainful employment and even volunteer work to some extent to hone skills, needs to be designed to fit the ones to be doing the tasks; this will mostly involve tasks which are not of the 9-to-5 plus 3 hour commute jobs, but probably would be mostly internet coordinated, local shipping between home workspaces, that kind of thing. Since there is such a huge amount that needs doing in this country, and so very many people who are underutilized, the two need matching up. The relatively few wealthy retired probably won't be part of this unless unusually altruistic; but the vast majority of the rest of the folks could pitch in, get started paying off the huge national debt, while re-establishing national capability to produce even the small things even at a small scale. Nurture the true craftsmen, the artisans, the imaginative thinkers, by providing things on which to practice and show gainful result, even on a partial volunteer basis. Making at least part of the reward to be participation in things that are fun to some extent and bring increased joy to life and satisfaction in a job well done.

There are probably big lessons that ought to be being learned re the factors that created the big debt, but hopefully we Americans will eventually figure that out and deal with it appropriately. But time is a-wasting, as it is said, let's get everybody busy helping out and coordinated in an intelligent fashion. If general business and corporate modes of business could do the job, it would have been done all along and there would be no problem now. But clearly they did not do the job, nor show signs they consider it their responsibility, owing fealty only to the bottom line for investors, instead of being guided by price increase only equals value added to the customer, which would also sometimes pick different avenues of research and different products to create, ones that fit the customer better, even if not quite so much profit for the company.

If the powers that be insist that only the business are allowed to do the job, unless they can somehow get those corporations to do the job, the job won't get done. GNP thus remains no better, national debt keeps going up. The longer it keeps getting worse, the harder it will be to climb out of the hole. Finger pointing the blame at each other will only make it harder to eventually work together to repair the damage. Our national ship is sinking ever faster; let's get busy at least patching the holes and then go from there.

Are dedicated to best

Well, it has taken me 70 years to figure out a few things, that would help other "Aspies" like me, who have special difficulty understanding people's doings in real time.

One thing I would like to pass on to other "Aspies" is that when an automotive research company is advertising for car designers to help with improving aerodynamic efficiency of minivans and claiming to be dedicated to providing the best in transportation, what they actually mean is that the are dedicated to best transportation but only if it involves their minivan products, instead of actually the most efficient and fully effective form of transportation for all people in all circumstances, and might even kick the support out from under that which looks like it might undermine their business livelihood if it can be done secretly enough. So don't suggest a pullband commute system to them to create instead of just minivans so as to save energy and commute time, for example. Similarly with them, many health industries, as they are dedicated to the best health that brings the most profit to their enterprises long term; this is not at all necessarily the same thing as the highest efficacy wellbeing for the users. Their statements are true but very narrow applicable; the implied overall meaning is not true, however, in many cases. The process of producing a product tends to tends to involve enormous compromises to produce a bundle that you hope will sell and provide you a living. As far as I know, no company,not even the government, has the entire vision of the country's best interests fully being weighed in their decisions. Much easier to just go for maximizing the bottom line, maximum profit for least effort, and call it a day.

Yet we being the customers on the other side of the corporate fence, would do well to support, by our purchases, that which most serves the well being of the overall systems by which all survive including ourselves. To do less will eventually result in less. Is it easier to just look out for Number One? Depends on how big your Number One is: is it just that which sits in your chair wearing your hat? Or include your mate, your children, your extended family, your town, your nation, your planet with all its living beings and inanimate resources all churning around as powered by the sun's energy on the stuff of this earth and guided by wondrous patterns of wholeness ... how big is your Number One? Is it all bigger than you are, really? Not your problem, can deal with only your assigned job? Just who is minding the overall nation store? If it is a nation of the people and by the people, then you as one of the people are responsible for your doings being nicely working with the needs of the whole. The guide of the fastest buck won't do the job, because too many pieces of the whole fail to get done, and without all the pieces, guess what eventually happens?

So don't expect others to be looking out for the wellbeing of the whole; each is looking out for their little piece of the whole and can't see much of the rest, even the CEO's of the biggies. Each seems to think that since they can only do so much, then it is all right to avoid looking at the overall picture of what is needed by this nation, the world system, the family walking down the street over there. Determine your needs, such as if you need to commute to your job from home, sure, do what is needed, drive a car on the freeway, ride the city bus, ride a horse or crawl through briarbushes on hands and knees, whatever to get it done for now; but at the same time, keep part of your mind on the subject of just what would be an adequately efficient and effective comfortable way to commute to work, and see if you can support the promising ways with a purchase. Same for the other important aspects of life, such as your healthy wellbeing; the medicines and medicators making a living off of what they happen to have available and know how to do, may well not be the best match for your overall long term wellbeing all of the time; keep an eye out for that which might be a more effective way of maintaining wellness and better healing of the occasional ding. Business including health care as well as car sales have too often "grown like Topsy" instead of growing to fill in the gaps in the overall life system on which you and all others depend. So in a business driven social system, it is up to the customer to guide the process by going for what works, not necessarily that which is being handed to them.

Maybe all this is obvious to non-Aspies, but am not sure about that. After all, people are much too complex to me as an Aspie.

Remembering Arthur C. Clarke

Yesterday, March 18, 2008, Sir Arthur C. Clarke passed away, at the age of 90, at a friend's home in Sri Lanka, where he had gone to live after his marriage failed. Suffering the illnesses that come with existing without one's mate lovingly, prostate and alzheimers, and complications of some polio causing wheelchair existence the last dozen years. Nonetheless, he had enjoyed the results of having communicated some mind-boggling insights that led to the telecommunications industry now in robust activity, for one thing.

Starting as a farm boy, he helped in research development of radar in Britain - research that had been shared with the United States enough to have a radar station working in Pearl Harbor in 1941 but the interpretation of its indications were not understood enough by its operators enough to sound the warning that it was intended to make, that would have saved much damage on December 7, 1941 in Pearl Harbor - a too frequent happening when the implications of a technology are not fully comprehended by those who later would utilize it - we now consider radar as everyday items in weather radar displays seen on our computer screen at home via the internet or TV, as well as speed detection radar worries when in too much of a hurry to get somewhere. Although he did not invent radar, he helped make it a reality. It was based on measuring the time it takes for a directional radio pulse wave to travel over to an object, bounce off of the object, and return to you; knowing how fast the radio pulse goes, near the speed of light, one then knows how far away the object is.

He was more of a visionary, telling of potentials of technology. In 1945, long before space travel was anything but fantasy science fiction, he contemplated the possibility of a man-made object in orbit around the Earth, orbiting the earth like the Moon does, and realized there was one particular orbit which would have a very unique quality with great usefulness. This would be an orbit in which the velocity needed to create the centrifugal force enough to just balance the gravitational pull of the Earth, if moving in the same direction as the Earth rotates, and was always traveling far above the Earth's equator, when at an altitude of 22,300 miles the orbiting object would move with the identical angular velocity of the Earth's rotation and thus would appear to stay motionless in place continuously over that same spot on the Earth, thus could be used as a communications relay between points on the ground which could both see the object up there in a stationary position relative to the Earth. Thus the "satellite dishes" which can be seen many places; they are aimed at some telecommunications satellite far up there in that 22,300 mile high orbit as predicted by Arthur C. Clarke, back in 1945, published then in a radio magazine. That special orbit high above the equator is now called the Clarke Orbit, Clarke Belt, or Geostationary Earth Orbit, often abbreviated "GEO."

His comprehension of the movement of things through the varying gravitational field of a planet, a force field which rapidly decreases the higher you get, specifically reducing inversely as the square of the distance from the center of the Earth in this case; and the dynamics of centrifugal force on rotating objects, and the ability to integrate diverse scientific and technological principles, enabled him to produce many ideas and communicated them through many books, such as "The Exploration of Space" of which I have a copy of the 1954 paperback version which was often very significant inspiration for perhaps most of my space transportation concepts.

Well known for being author of the story behind the movie "2001: A Space Odessy" directed by Stanley Kubrick, in which the classic wheel-like space station is portrayed, much as the artist Chesley Bonnestell painted for magazine covers in the 1950's, he wrote science fiction as well as scientifically based technological visions.

Through his technological and science fiction writings, he provided key insights that helped me cope with the need to provide real numbers to my efforts to find ways for mankind to easily expand civilization hugely into space with the technology basis already in existence. My concepts of the Mooncable, the Centristation, and the stress and energy calculations upon which the potentials of industrial uses of the Clarke Orbit or Clarke Belt could be massively utilized to maybe even "save the planet" to use the popular term these days, often linked well with Clarke's concepts. In the back of his novel "Fountains of Paradise" about building a space elevator to the earth surface, he comments that many people had independently "invented" the concept of the anchored tether space elevator, a climbing structure supported by the centrifugal force of a weight being swung by the Earth's 24 hour daily rotation like a tether ball, as he also did; and I had done that too in 1969, all unaware of each others' efforts; but we all were later than its invention by a Russian, Artsunov, who was the first to independently invent the concept and publish it, unknown to the rest of us. Many of us also came up with the same basic idea without awareness of the others' efforts, including myself and Arthur Clarke. My prior pondering of the gravitational field and rotational concepts in Clarke's writings no doubt helped slide the insight of using the Earth itself to bend a kinetic energy supported transportation spinning belt system to reach from the Earth surface around up to the Clarke Belt above the opposite side of the planet.

The flow of ideas and their combination potentials and what could be done with them, seem invisibly arm-in-arm for many visionaries, and I feel much gratitude for Arthur C. Clarke. I have also even found myself writing science fiction utilizing these concepts, particularly my 2006 novel "Building Up" (see http://www.escalatorhi.com/building%20up.html to read it online) which involved both building the tethered space elevator and the wheel-like space station under construction and use in the novel.

I feel sad that his later years were so difficult, including loss of his mate and eventual reduction to wheelchair and fading memory, but he did have some fun times wandering the beach, and exploring the sea beyond the edge of the seashore beach via scuba diving, to explore the quite different world along the bottom of the ocean and in the waters above it, populated by diverse creatures looking and acting much like the "bug eyed monsters" of some science fiction stories, but in the sea were real living creatures with ways quite different from our human lives.

Arthur C. Clarke experienced the imaginative living of his concepts both in technological writings and science fiction adventures, and I have often found myself walking in the footsteps he left in the sand on the seashore of time.

By James E D Cline on 20080319, 1105 hrs.